The Dark Side of Dolphins

I am currently helping take care of some tropical fish (such as angelfish, rainbow cichlids, parrotfish). Nature red in tooth and claw indeed! Aggressive, territorial... unpleasant animals. Pleasant to look at, though.

That got me thinking about a previous post of mine titled Dolphins as Persons. Yes, dolphins are very intelligent animals, and like another intelligent species they are set apart by cruel behavior that less clever animals don't seem capable of. Sexual aggression of males against females is particularly disturbing, as is killing for the sake of killing, since these are behaviors that seem to spring simply from sadistic feelings rather than having some evolutionary justification -- also much like another intelligent species I can think of.

Information on this less savory side of dolphins isn't difficult to find. You could start with this brief Slate article from 2009.

A more closely related intelligent-and-sadistic species is the common chimpanzee. Natural is not always good, at least from a human point of view. And what does it mean to "be in touch with nature"? If it means to be in touch with our human nature... humans may have a much more pliable nature and instincts than other animals, but what does that mean for a Pagan? To surrender ourselves to our animal nature is often a good thing, but it can also be a bad thing as well. Addictions, for example; not just for drugs but for food or sex or other behaviors. To "act naturally" is often to to debase rather than elevate ourselves. Again: what does it really mean for a Pagan to be "in touch with nature"?

Anyway, I'm rambling now and getting off topic: I will follow up these thoughts with a post later on how old Paganism differed from today's variety, via a couple passages from Marcus Aurelius.

Against Worship

When I first began reading books on Neopaganism, interactions with deities being described with words such as "communing" turned me off. As far as I could tell, religion largely consists of the worship of deities. Deities are better than us, and we ask favors of them. This is true of religions all over the world, even so-called "atheist" religions like Buddhism. Thus, I thought Wiccan descriptions of communing with the God and Goddess just as silly as Christians who talk about having a "personal relationship" with Jesus, a historically anachronistic (and thus wrong, in my view) theology if there ever was one.

But what's so great about worship? I certainly don't think much of worship in any other context. Worship of political figures disgusts me; I have to bite my tongue when I see friends fawning over Obama (or Reagan for that matter, but that's not so common now). Worship of sports heroes or movie stars is simply bizarre. The number of famous people deserving of admiration is really quite small, and I have never found anyone I thought I could adore, fawn over, or worship.

I don't think worship is healthy in any form, however mild it may seem. I realize that many people are inspired by people who are great at what they do, and that this attitude often tends toward worship. So is worship in that context a good thing? No, I say, for two reasons:

1. Even if someone becomes a great pianist or scientist or writer because they are inspired by some great figure in that field, that doesn't mean that behavior is healthy. Need I remind everyone that the highly driven type A personalities who reach the top in their field often struggle with psychological problems and/or misuse and abuse their loved ones? They are often deeply unhappy despite the obsessions that make them great; in fact, the obsession that makes them great probably leads to their misery. They often cause great harm to others. So as much as I often respect the quality of the work produced by such people, I cannot say that it justifies the hero worship.
2. Being inspired by a great person is different from worshiping them. They are separable, at least in theory. I could be inspired by a great pianist to work hard and become a great pianist myself, even though I don't think much of that great pianist personally aside from their natural talent and work ethic.

When we do see people worshiping other people in a political context, it is never a good sign. Those who seek power are corrupt, and those who actually grasp it even more so. Power in whatever form corrupts even the best of people (see a previous post of mine on how this can happen in Pagan communities). On an even stronger note, I would add that to have a leader is to ask for problems, and for similar reasons. Power by itself tends to produce admiration and worship. That is no doubt why the Occupy movement has thus far eschewed electing leaders.

If I were still a Christian and believed that God demanded worship, I would probably attempt to find a way to justify it despite my misgivings about worship in any other context. Luckily, I am not; I'm just a Pagan, and now I'm beginning to rethink my relationship with the God and Goddess in light of this newfound attitude toward worship.

To Be Spiritual Is To Act Spiritual

Due to some personal difficulties, my religious practice has waned a bit as of late, as one can see from my blog entries. I have been reading leftist literature, so my intellectual life hasn't quite dried up (I just started D'Amato's The Meaning of Marxism), but I haven't had the time or inclination to continue with what meager Wiccan practice I was doing in the first place.

I do think this is important. I suspect that many Pagans spend little of their time doing their religion. I don't actually have any evidence of this other than my online reading; I haven't really met many real-life Pagans yet. But a spirituality that isn't practiced never goes anywhere, never develops. I can call myself a Wiccan, but that won't mean anything if I don't do anything about it. Religion, like almost any aspect of life, is mostly in the doing. Can you imagine someone calling themselves a tennis player if almost all they did was occasionally watch tennis or read about it?

I've dropped the ball! I suspect some going back to some Wiccan ritual would particularly do me good right now; it is indeed a paradox that when we most need to do something is when we feel most averse to doing it!

Nihilism and the Benevolent Cosmos

I had a conversation with a friend the other night about philosophy and in particular nihilism. By nihilism I mean the belief that life is meaningless; that human reason is impotent; that there is no such thing as good or bad in an uncaring, hostile universe. As someone who studied philosophy intensively for a decade or so, I made the point that most philosophers nowadays are nihilists, though few admit it and many are inconsistent in their beliefs.

Then I really was struck by my friend's observation that many philosophers start with the conclusion that the universe is "malevolent" and then filter all the evidence to prove that. I found this a rather striking expression for him to use, since he is essentially secular in outlook, but it also reminded me of my recent reorientation to the universe as fundamentally filled with the divine. Yes, the universe is in many ways awful however you slice it; for example, our best case scenario for Earth is to be cooked in a billion years when the sun expands. On the other hand, life itself is extraordinary, and human sentience (and that of perhaps a few other animal species) even more so. Looking at the vast emptiness and violence of space, life can seem like more than the random collision of atoms, but even if it is built into the laws of physics (which I believe, of course), it is difficult not to feel awe at the universe that coughed us up.

A purely secular person can feel this same awe, but must bow to the fact that the cosmos is simply this way, that it is simply our limited perspective that makes it seem so remarkable. What of a Pagan? What of a Wiccan? Can we look at the world around us and say that it is not only the work of the laws of physics, but that underlying those laws is a force that is continuous with but not limited to the physical universe, one that made life, or made life possible, in order to express joy and love? Are the God and Goddess, whether sentient beings or manifestations of the cosmic polarity or something else, really guiding our existence in meaningful ways?

Demonizing The Other

Over the past few weeks I have started following some Pagan blogs, and am encouraged by the number of sane, rational Pagans out there. Things aren't perfect, though. The combination of crony capitalism and Christian social conservatism in the Republican party makes the right a perfect foil for leftwing political views combined with religious pluralism.

A few days ago, one of these progressive Pagans used Manichean language to describe the right in the U.S., calling them "nihilists" who only believe in the will to power. The impression I got was that, while Democrats were ordinary, flawed politicians, Republicans were a different species altogether, without any principles or scruples.

While I'm happy to grant that the GOP is considerably worse than the Democratic party at present, I do not believe they occupy different universes. Both parties are populated by the last people on Earth whom you'd want to be politicians, i.e. people who want to be politicians! Almost any politician who makes it to the top ranks of government is going to be driven by goals worse than a desire to serve others, and having once attained office will make more and more compromises with whatever nobler principles he or she has. All politicians are demagogues to a degree, which means you really can't take what they say that seriously. They are balancing what they believe with their need to say things that will get them elected.

Furthermore, I question the intellectual integrity of anyone in this day and age who subscribes to such absolute bifurcations between the Light and the Dark, Good and Evil. That's a relic of dualist religions, of which Christianity is an unofficial member. I suppose there is room in Neopaganism for dualism of that kind, but I doubt that Pagans who subscribe to this kind of demonization of The Other are actually aware of what they are doing.

Once you demonize The Other, you don't need to try to understand them. They are no longer really people, but forces for evil wearing a mask. Unless you believe your opponents are sociopaths one and all, you have an obligation to understand where they are coming from, no matter how repugnant their views -- or so it seems to me. To do otherwise is to make the same mistakes that led to so much human suffering in previous generations, as Santayana said: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

Radical Feminism in Wicca

I recently read a blog post by a male Pagan who is upset by those radical feminists whose embrace of Neopaganism makes them the female embodiment of the sexism and misogyny of traditional religions. He is particularly disturbed by the accusation that men are robots acting out "sperm wars." I instantly recognized this phrase as either coming out of or being related to evolutionary psychology. I haven't read much specifically on that subject, but we did discuss it a bit when I took philosophy of science.

I think evolutionary psychology and evolutionary explanations for human behavior are fine, as long as they don't become reductive. Let me explain. A common explanation given for human mating behavior (= who you are likely to want to sleep with) is that men can basically give sperm away without any consequences, while a woman who has sex with a man is potentially going to be giving up, at a minimum, nine months of her life, not to mention the energy costs of childrearing. So men are, so it is alleged, "programmed" to be promiscuous, and women are "programmed" to be picky. Women may be so picky that they won't be satisfied with the husband they're stuck with, but "sleep around" to get the best sperm.

I don't find this particularly offensive, especially because this hypothesis is just dealing in trends, trends which, I assume, are fairly well-established. I've known women who loved sex and weren't particularly picky. And there are many men who are truly happy with just one woman.

Of course the assumption that these trends are well-established may be false! I don't know. I do think that this sort of thing can sound suspiciously like a just-so story. But anyway, this trend, assuming it's real, should not cause us trouble until we begin stereotyping people or excluding people from our social circles based on it.

Why? Well, let's look at other prejudices. There are all sorts of racial and cultural stereotypes, and most of them are frowned upon in modern, free societies, even when there is a factual foundation for them. After all, they just represent trends (real or false), and it is important that we approach each human being as a unique individual. She or he may belong to a group that (is alleged to) tend to be X, but prejudging them based on X is harmful and unfair, since there is a strong possibility that they aren't X at all.

So evolutionary psychology is pretty worthless when it comes to the battle of the sexes. Even if men are as a rule more likely to have certain undesirable traits, that doesn't mean all or even most men have those traits. This particular male Pagan is really upset by the radical feminists in e.g. Dianic Wicca or other Neopagan groups who "don't need men" and are extremely sexist, in the same way that traditional religions were sexist against women. I don't know what to think about that. I have seen and heard about so many idiots in my life that I don't have any strong hope that ideals, like male-female polarity and equality in Wicca, will actually translate into real behavior. It certainly was hardly the case in the Christian communities I frequently for a decade or so. Why should it be any better among Neopagans? The radical feminists who despise men probably have some reason for their hatred. I'll be blunt and say that such hatred is just as idiotic and myopic as the misogyny a friend of mine clings to. But I can't control anyone, and if Paganism is truly a free approach to religious values, then I can't get personally miffed about the stupidity of other Pagans -- certainly not the way I used to get angry when I saw bad Christians.

Religion as Life-Denying

After a bit of pondering, I have realized what it is about most religions that bothers me (such as Christianity and Buddhism, my two main interests before I wandered over to Paganism):

Most highly developed religions (i.e. those that are the introspective product of a civilization rather than organically developed practices "on the ground") claim that there is something wrong with the universe or with humankind, and that their religion has the cure for it.

Christianity has original sin. Buddhism has craving. The key to fixing your relationship with yourself, God, or the universe is the practices of the religion.

This appear to me to be a flat-out, head-in-the-clouds denial of the universe as we have it. Having a strong scientific bent, it seemed to me that the scientific evidence points to physics and evolution as explaining the world as we see it. Yes, much, probably most, of life is ultimately tragic, but in trying to find a solution to that, most religions paper over it with a promise of salvation, rather than trying to celebrate the tragedy that is the cosmos. Christianity is particularly guilty on this front because it claims that God created the world, but that should include the laws of physics, which gives us all the variety, good and bad, that we see today.

Clearly Neopaganism in many guises may fall victim to this tendency as well, especially when heavily influenced by the New Age, or by old-fashioned Christianity. It seems to me that "getting back to nature" as a Neopagan soteriology has its dangers if divorced from an earthy, evolutionary context. I also wonder about The Summerland as a copout, though I don't think it necessarily falls into this trap.

Having said that, however, Neopaganism seems much better able to integrate into its theology the death and evil that exists in the universe. They are not desirable, but they are part of the cosmos and to pretend we can make them all go away is a delusion. At least, I'd like to think that Neopaganism does a better job of this than other religions. Of course this must take into account the fact that there is no one Neopagan religion, and that each one has no dogma that its believers are required to follow.

Dinner and a Show

Apologies in advance for any offense I cause here. Let me state at the outset that I have no conscious bias against or even dislike of non-heterosexuals. I just had a friend out himself to me and nothing has changed between us. My concern is purely about the consistency of Wiccan cosmology and theology. I haven't written about this topic anywhere before and realize that I might come off as callous or worse.

The other night I went to dinner with some friends. One person at a table not far from us dropped a plate, and someone at another table began making comments, getting louder with "kids these days are worthless." A woman at the same table where the plate was dropped took umbrage, and an argument ensued. At one point I thought it might get violent. The guy who started it went into a strange tirade featuring the usual social conservative talking points about how "no one teaches kids morals these days," etc. He and his companions eventually left in a huff.

Anyway, that was the "show," since it was briefly entertaining before it got ugly.

Afterwards it took us a little while to figure out what had really happened, since dropping a plate hardly seems to be evidence of the moral decay of society. At first we thought it was a woman defending her children. We saw that she was with another woman, who had a "butch" haircut and, well... so we decided it was a same-sex couple and their kids. Eventually we realized that it was an "LGBT club" or something.

Anyway, we finally figured out that the guy who started the whole mess was a homophobe (he had a seat facing the group and had figured things out before us), and that his real beef was seeing a bunch of gay people congregating. One of my friends who had not been facing this guy had thought he was a woman with a raspy voice, and that made me ponder the idea that homophobes are often repressed homosexuals, a claim backed up by one study from 1996. That's obviously not enough evidence by itself, but it certainly explains this case. Of course who knows if it's true, but the homophobia we're sure about.

We wondered at the time why the woman didn't pick up on the homophobia, but later we realized she did. She must have dealt with this kind of thing before, which explains her immediate and strong reaction as well.

Although homophobia is certainly rampant in conservative Christianity, I find it interesting that Gardner's Wicca also considered homosexuality a deviant form of behavior at first, in keeping with the times in which it developed. And it seems to make sense as well, since Wiccan cosmology and myth deals in polarities, in fact with the coupling of a male and a female deity. But things have changed, and now most or all Wiccans seem to accept that same-sex couples can instantiate the cosmic polarity of the God and Goddess just as well as straight couples.

Given the God-Goddess polarity, this is a little puzzling to me if we assume that there weren't political motivations to this change of heart. I mean, I wonder how Wiccans would handle this separation of the physical (male-female) from the spiritual and theological (polarities) were it not for the progressive movement pushing them to do so. Suppose the movement for greater tolerance of LGBT people had never taken off. Would Wicca have become a gay-friendly religion? I just have to doubt that. Am I wrong?

Weird Synchronicities

Although I have seen scatterings of evidence for psychic or magical powers operating in this universe before, I tend to resist taking them seriously. Nevertheless, it seems the past few days a few things have pushed me strongly in the direction of Druidry, and I am inclined to believe that there is some real Jungian synchronicity at work.

I hate to jump from tradition to tradition, but I've decided to read up a little on Druidry and see if I want to pursue that or stick with Wicca for now. I am reading The Druidry Handbook by John Michael Greer. I like it a lot so far and will review it here once I'm finished. (For the record, I plan to review some of the Wiccan or general Neoopagan books I've read as well.)

A Few Comments on Buddhism

Apologies in advance for another rambling, unfocused post.


Other than Christianity, my main religious interest has been Buddhism, mainly the Theravada and Chan (Chinese Zen) schools. Buddhism is sold in the West as a "rational" religion, in fact not really a religion at all, but more of a philosophy. It is claimed that there are no gods in Buddhism, that it is based on experience, not scriptures.This is probably what you think is true of Buddhism as well, among other things, such as that it is a "peaceful" religion. To an occasionally hyper-rational person such as myself, this kind of practice was quite appealing.


I cannot pin down exactly why I became disenchanted with Buddhism. I certainly haven't thought about it as much as I have about Christianity, mainly because I never spent as much time "dabbling" in it as I did with Christianity.


Anyway, a couple years ago I discovered, little by little, that the myth of Buddhism that I briefly sketched in the first paragraph was not really true; that Buddhism, almost from the beginning, placed a lot of emphasis on faith, prayer, and scripture, and that Buddhism has a violent past just like Christianity -- in opposition to its principles, just like Christianity, but there nevertheless.


But more interesting, I also discovered "folk Buddhism," both in my personal travels to East Asia and my reading about Chinese Pure Land Buddhism, which is the most accessible form of Buddhism. I think that my burgeoning interest in this more, well, folksy form of Buddhism was a major factor in softening me up to take a second look at Neopaganism. Chanting and praying to Amitabha or Guanyin, even if I didn't quite believe in them, made it possible for me to take a less literal, restricted approach to spirituality.


I hope this brief, personal post inspires readers to learn more about real Buddhism instead of the sanitized version you've been sold in the West. I will write more about my experiences with Buddhism (of all kinds) in the future.

Pagans in the Military?

I have read a bit on the growing presence of pagans in the U.S. military, but I was surprised when a friend of mine, who just got out of the Marines a few months ago, asserted that "most" of the soldiers in his unit were Odinists. I would be interested to hear from anyone about what they know concerning the presence of Neopaganism in the armed forces.

(As an aside, he told me that he doesn't have any religion, but would probably become an Odinist if he were to choose one. He also calls Obama a "socialist." This reinforces my impression that Heathanism is much friendlier to right wing ideas than other forms of Neopaganism.)

How is Worship Possible?

While trying, off and on over a period of more than a decade, to be a sincere believing Christian, I frequently ran up against the embarrassing fact that prayer is not only difficult but unnatural and even bizarre, at least for me. Not only did it feel odd to be addressing a deity who never talked back, but I could never be quite sure how seriously I could take petitionary prayer.

Just today I was listening to a local NPR program discussing Tim Tebow, and someone made the obligatory snarky remark that God really cares who wins this or that football game. That's emblematic of one problem: competing petitionary prayers. But there's also the problem of unanswered prayer, not helped by the stock Christian answer that "sometimes God's answer is "no."" Then there's the question of how your prayer you could, by itself, change God's mind, especially since God is eternal (outside of time) in traditional Christian theology.

Finally, there is the fact that although God is technically a "Person" in the Chalcedonian sense, he's not a person you can really relate to, the way you can to your best friend, at least in traditional Trinitarian Christianity. God might as well be an all-powerful hibiscus or Linux server. The incarnation of Christ was no help for me on this front.

I felt more comfortable around Catholicism and Orthodoxy, where praying to saints has a long history. Praying to saints (even if you are technically asking for their intercession with God) feels much more natural, for here are humans, albeit imaginary, with personalities like you're own, however saintly and exalted they may be. I suspect that is why that the cult of the saints is so prominent in traditional (pre-Reformation) Christianity; it is much more of a human, livable form of worship than the unapproachable, inhuman Deity.

Is Neopaganism any better on this front? Yes, I think so, because it allows a full gamut of beliefs about what constitutes the divine and individual divinities. From Jungian archetypes to literal polytheism, I feel that I can find the psychological space for worship. I haven't quite found my place yet, but I'm searching.

Paganism as a New Religious Movement

Having a close relative who has been involved with a New Religious Movement for decades, I have some thoughts about the differences between established, "normal" religions and NRMs, including those that sometimes aptly deserve the moniker "cult." Wicca and other Neopagan movements, along with Heathenism, clearly are not harmful cults as a rule, but they often do display some of the negative characteristics of NRMs. Here's a clever video illustrating a phenomenon I'm sure all Neopagans have heard about.

I think Neopaganism's embrace of sex as a positive force, as opposed to one that needs to be carefully managed, is generally a good thing in a modern, non-rural, technologically advanced society. It also matches up rather nicely with my social libertarianism. But it is no secret that men in NRMs often use power, authority, and manipulation to coerce women to have sex with them. This video seems to encapsulate nicely how this dynamic plays out in Neopagan circles.